Well…the headline only says the planet is 6.9 times as big as Earth. Jupiter is at least that large, last time I checked, so without more context I also don’t know what is special about it.
Actually, Earth is around about the largest that rocky planets tend to get. Look at the gap between Earth and Uranus, it’s huge. Planets in the middle size are rare. This planet is a super-earth type planet.
I think that it’s more impressive to identify something that’s only 6.9x the size of earth, given that the smaller it is the harder it would be to detect.
I get what you mean but there’s almost 6,000 exoplanets in NASA’s catalog so one imagines it isn’t as huge of a deal to find a new one as it would have been when say, Hubble was new. To that end it presumably happens often enough that you wouldn’t get the meme’s scenario of a 50 year career vet getting all spiteful because a kid beat him to the punch.
They even have had surveys on citizen science sites like zooniverse where any of us could evaluate data from stars looking for the dips that could signify a potential planet. It’s all very cool, but I kind agree with all the data and technology we have now it’s way easier to find new ones.
For real. Confirming the existence of any exo planet is a huge technological feat and yet now it’s happening non stop. The first ever confirmed exo planet was 1995 and now we’ve got a catalog of almost 6,000 confirmed. Wild times!
What a time to be alive
Well…the headline only says the planet is 6.9 times as big as Earth. Jupiter is at least that large, last time I checked, so without more context I also don’t know what is special about it.
Actually, Earth is around about the largest that rocky planets tend to get. Look at the gap between Earth and Uranus, it’s huge. Planets in the middle size are rare. This planet is a super-earth type planet.
I think that it’s more impressive to identify something that’s only 6.9x the size of earth, given that the smaller it is the harder it would be to detect.
I get what you mean but there’s almost 6,000 exoplanets in NASA’s catalog so one imagines it isn’t as huge of a deal to find a new one as it would have been when say, Hubble was new. To that end it presumably happens often enough that you wouldn’t get the meme’s scenario of a 50 year career vet getting all spiteful because a kid beat him to the punch.
They even have had surveys on citizen science sites like zooniverse where any of us could evaluate data from stars looking for the dips that could signify a potential planet. It’s all very cool, but I kind agree with all the data and technology we have now it’s way easier to find new ones.
Zooniverse is a very cool website for citizen science! For anyone interested: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mschwamb/planet-hunters-ngts
For real. Confirming the existence of any exo planet is a huge technological feat and yet now it’s happening non stop. The first ever confirmed exo planet was 1995 and now we’ve got a catalog of almost 6,000 confirmed. Wild times!